Trump’s Vendetta Against Mail-in Voting Could Cost Him the 2020 Election

The president’s claims that mail-in ballots are corrupt, even during a pandemic, could make a fraught process harder, hindering Republican efforts to get out the vote and disenfranchising Trump’s own supporters.

As last week’s election debacle unfolded in Wisconsin, and tens of thousands of people struggled to get their votes counted, Donald Trump let loose: “Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to statewide mail-in voting,” he tweeted. “Democrats are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.” It’s distracting and inaccurate, but the president gets rare points for honesty in admitting that his views on mail-in voting are dictated by electoral self-interest.

But deduct points for political acumen. When I spoke to a cross-section of voting experts, they all rejected the idea that mail-in voting hurts Republicans. Wendy Weiser, an expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, told me that it is “very baffling that the point of attack is on a method that favors older, whiter voters.” Michael Hanmer, an election expert at the University of Maryland, argued that there is no evidence that expanding mail-in voting is inherently favorable to either party and that, like most voting efforts, it tends to favor whoever best organizes, educates, and motivates their base. An effective get-out-and-mail strategy by Republicans among older voters has been credited with cementing the party’s strength in both Arizona (where Republicans substantially outpace Democrats on the list of people automatically receiving mail ballots) and Florida.

This year the stakes could be even higher. If coronavirus resurges in the fall, as some experts have warned, older voters could be even more discouraged from in-person voting. In a recent Morning Consult poll, 74% of voters over 65 indicated they would be very or somewhat concerned about in-person voting if coronavirus were still a material threat in November. In what could be a painfully close election, even incremental drop-offs could pose a significant threat to Republican chances. Even worse for the president, confidence among Republicans in mail-in balloting now runs more than 20 percentage points behind Democrats, according to Morning Consult, and voters who are very favorable to Trump are a full 27 points behind those who are very unfavorable. This could well have a negative effect on Trump turnout if in-person voting becomes difficult, as it did in Wisconsin last week.

Because of this, not all Republican leaders immediately fell in behind Trump. Some did; Missouri governor Pat Parson declared he was “not interested in making any drastic changes…out of fear.” (Mail-in voting in Missouri is notoriously difficult: It is permitted only in six statutorily defined situations, and a notary must witness your signature on the absentee ballot in most cases.) Republican officials in other states, including Ohio, Washington, Nebraska, and West Virginia, all openly defended the efficacy of the process, or began pushing changes to make it easier to vote by mail. Even Trump walked back his comments, at least a little bit, tweeting, “Absentee Ballots are a great way to vote for the many senior citizens, military, and others who can’t get to the polls on Election Day. These ballots are very different from 100% Mail-In Voting, which is ‘RIPE for FRAUD,’ and shouldn’t be allowed!”

Likely more important, though, is the impact of Trump’s rants on local Republican officials. Voting by mail, especially for people not used to the process, is a fraught affair, with many opportunities for disqualifying mistakes. First-time mail voters need to learn how and when to request ballots, states will have to print and distribute millions of them, and voters will need to learn how to fill them out, at times navigating multiple signatures, witnesses, and, in a few cases, even notarization. Each of these steps makes dropouts more likely, and requires voter education, training of election (and postal) staff, and significant investments in technology. If you don’t do it right, you end up with lots of “errors on both ends,” as Hanmer put it to me.

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A small group of states are well positioned to deal with the inevitable surge in demand for distance voting—Oregon, Washington, Utah, Colorado, and Hawaii already automatically mail a ballot to every registered voter, and a handful of other states, California and Florida included, already have such high rates of mail voting that they can likely handle a huge uptick. The other 40 states or so all permit some form of mail voting. But they could easily be overwhelmed by sheer volume.

Wisconsin is an early warning of what can go wrong in an overloaded system. Problems emerged at every stage in the process, but they were acute for the hundreds of thousands of voters who opted to vote by mail: Thousands never received their ballots, and thousands more completed ballots that were rejected due to a lack of a postmark, leaving many voters “quite literally without a vote,” as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg so presciently warned. The final results in Wisconsin favored the Democrats, which may lead some Republicans to rethink their strategies, but it will undoubtedly leave a residue of litigation, disenfranchisement, and a sense of illegitimacy around the process. Wisconsin may be a hard case due to its extraordinarily bad timing, but many of the aggravating factors could well be at work on a national basis come November, in what most are predicting will be a record-turnout election. As Michael McDonald, an expert in voting at the University of Florida, told me, Wisconsin is a “canary in the coal mine. We could easily end up with a whole flock of canaries.”

Voter education is one of the best tools for increasing successful use of mail ballots, substantially raising the stakes for each party’s organizing efforts. Trump’s rhetoric could easily have a chilling effect on Republican efforts as local officials grapple with voter skepticism. Early fallout could be seen in Georgia, where Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger moved quickly to mail absentee ballot request forms to all 6.9 million active voters in the state. Criticized for his efforts by his own party, Raffensperger hastily assembled a task force to address remote-voting fraud. If Trump pushes party officials to prioritize fraud over fulfillment, local Republicans may spend too much time worrying about the relatively small risks associated with manipulation of the process, and lose focus on the critical task of helping constituents vote. Wisconsin is again a warning: Local Republicans’ effort focused on undermining mail-in voting, while Democrats invested in helping their voters navigate the challenging system the Republicans put in place. The result was a proportionally higher turnout for Democrats, and a significant electoral rebuke for Wisconsin Republicans.

It’s still a bit of a mystery why Trump, and other leading Republicans, have reacted so negatively to mail-in voting. Republicans are the ones who first embraced the process in the 1990s, on the reasonable theory that it would be of greatest advantage to older voters. Hanmer, the University of Maryland expert, noted that Trump was successful under the rules of 2016, and may just be reluctant to endorse any changes to a voting regime that treated him well. More likely, though, as Barry Burden, a voting expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, put it, his attitude reflects “a knee-jerk reaction to expanding voter opportunities.” The two parties have spent decades battling over voting procedures, with Republicans often suspicious of efforts to make voting easier, fearful of Democrats trying to empower young people and people of color. In theory, Trump has grown so accustomed to associating voter access with Democratic turnout that he leapt to the conclusion that mail-in voting falls into that category.

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Fortunately, many states, controlled by both Democrats and Republicans, are already taking steps toward strengthening the fall voting process; every expert I spoke to said that a strong nonpartisan ethic among local election officials will be the nation’s best asset. This week the Washington Postreported that governors and secretaries of state in Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Georgia announced steps to encourage widespread mail-in voting. But the challenge for even well-intentioned states is substantial. Many will have to navigate primaries and special elections between now and November, leaving precious little time and resources to telescope three years of effort into one chaotic six-month period. And so far congressional Republicans have been willing to fund only a small portion of the estimated $2 billion it will cost to expand mail voting for the fall. With all these challenges, Burden admitted that “whatever we do, it will be flawed in some way.” Failure to minimize those flaws, however, could throw the results of the 2020 election into the courts of law, or worse, the courts of public opinion.